Uhuru among African leaders struggling to attract followers on Instagram

African presidents are struggling to attract followers on Instagram, a report authored by global communications agency Burson Cohn &Wolfe (BCW) has revealed.

President Uhuru Kenyatta is the 4^thmost followed leader in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) boasting of 100,000 followers trailing Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo, the most popular leader on the platform in SSA who is followed by 444,000 people.

Rwanda’s President and African Union (AU) Chairperson Paul Kagame is the SSA’s second most popular leader on Instagram with 209,000 followers while Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari is followed by 192,000 people.

Instagram is more popular with the youth compared to Twitter and Facebook which are more popular with professionals which would explain the low number of people following the leaders on the platform preferred by millenials.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India leads the pack of global leaders popular on Instagram with 15.85 million followers.

Indonesian President Joko Widodo is the second mostpopular leader on the platform with 14 million followers having grown his fanbase by 50% in the past year.

US President Donald Trump is the third most popular leader on Instagram with 10.9 million followers.

Pope Francis occupies fourth place in the rankings with 5.7 million followers edging out Queen Rania of Jordan who is followed by 4.9 million people.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the White House account have 4.6 million and 4.3 million followers respectively.

The UK Royal Family has almost tripled its followers in the past one year in large part thanks to the pictures of the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle which increased the account’s followers by 570,000 on May 19, 2018.

BCW’s study this year analysed the activity of the 426 Instagram accounts of heads of state and government and foreign ministers, 100 more than in the 2017 study, using aggregate data from Facebook’s Crowd Tangle tool.

As of October 1, 2018,the accounts had a combined total of 98.3 million followers and published 98,372 posts during the year which garnered a total of 860.4 million interactions(comments and shares).